Public coordinates shown as a random point within 10KM of the true coordinates. True coordinates are only visible to you and the curators of projects to which you add the observation.

private

Coordinates completely hidden from public maps, true coordinates only visible to you and the curators of projects to which you add the observation. Observations with private coordinates will still be used to verify place check lists.

Now that I look at this, I agree this is Prenolepis imparis too (one of the few ants I know). These are the small black ants that look kind of like the invasive argentine ant but their abdomens are bigger (and are native). They're often found walking around solitarily in the winter, and like argentine ants, they tend aphids.

Yes, they are super common and conspicuous in this part of the country, one of the few ant species that are active during the winter. Their mesosoma has a pretty distinctive profile: a bulbous pronotum followed by depressed mesonotum/propodeum, with a lateral promesonotal constriction. Their eyes are relatively large and set far back on their almost spherical head, and the gaster is big and fairly pointy posteriorly. If you were to look at their petiole under a microscope you would notice it has a distinctive wedge shape, too.

I just noticed that in some of the original pictures, you can see a tiny fringe of hairs at the tip of the gaster: the acidopore. This is a feature of the subfamily Formicinae, which automatically tells you that this isn't an Argentine ant, which belongs to the Dolichoderinae.